At the Toronto Film Festival 2013 it's all about the biggies: studio blockbusters sit lined up like rockets on launching pads, positioned for awards season. Most prominent, perhaps, is Alfonso Cuaron's Gravity.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning stage play about a dysfunctional Oklahoma family coping with the suicide of clan's patriarch translates well to the screen -- in the sense that I didn't feel like I was watching a recorded play. Though, it's certainly a performance film. So much scenery is chewed between Meryl Streep (as Violet, the bitter mother), Julia Roberts, Chris Cooper, Ewan McGregor and Benedict Cumberbatch, that the title of this movie could have been called August: Bubble Yum. Yet, even with all of those heavy hitters on board, Dermot Mulroney somehow manages to steal every one of his scenes.

Secrets and lies carried the day in most of the five films I saw Monday at the Toronto International Film Festival. But then, aren't the most interesting movies built around them? It's so obvious that Mike Leigh used the idea as the title of one of his finest efforts.

In theaters this month is a pair of amusing documentaries, an Oscar nominee, and the latest drama from a world-class filmmaker. Any time there are five pictures this good playing on theater screens, I take heart.

Film festival programmers rarely create festivals full of films built around a single theme. Yet quite unintentionally, I spent Friday seeing five films that dealt with the idea of abandonment, reunion and reconciliation.